Thursday, February 14, 2013

BUILD IT

An Affordable Linux Gaming Rig

We show you how to pick the best parts, pick the best distro, and put it all together

THE MISSION The free Linux operating system has been around for ages, but its inherent complexity and limited support has always relegated its use to extreme enthusiasts, programmers, and other hardcore types. That might be changing, though, as a lot of loyal PC enthusiasts are less than pleased with Windows 8, and gaming juggernaut Valve has thrown its hat into the ring by launching a Linux version of Steam, its popular online content delivery service. Given the lackluster reception of Windows 8 and the renewed popularity of Linux, we decided to build a Linux gaming box to see for ourselves whether the OS, at this time, could be a reasonable alternative to Windows for gaming.

CHOOSING THE HARDWARE

OUR LINUX MACHINE was built with a low target price of $650 because we wanted this project to be semi-easy to duplicate by anyone. With this in mind, we started with Intel’s Ivy Bridge Core i3-3220 processor, as it comes at a reasonable cost, gives us a great upgrade path, and its low TDP of 55W means we won’t need a massive CPU cooler or PSU. Our Asus P8Z77-V LE motherboard is also affordable while offering both SLI and CrossFire support, as well as two USB 3.0 ports. Power is provided by a CX430 Corsair power supply from the company’s low-cost Builder series. Given our modest build-out, we figured anything bigger than 430W would be overkill.

GPU duties are handled by a Gigabyte GTX 650 video card, which at $120 performs better than a Radeon HD 7750 and should be sufficient for our Linux adventure. The system requirements of the available games are very low, so a more powerful GPU would be wasted. As our budget didn’t allow for an SSD, we went with a 500GB, 7,200rpm WD Caviar Blue. We scored 8GB of G.Skill Ripjaws RAM because it was dirt cheap at just $45. Holding all the gear is a Corsair Carbide case, which is just $60 but has USB 3.0 front panel ports, cable routing, and tool-less drive bays.

With the hardware in hand, it’s time to build the machine. If you need any guidance putting it together, check out this stepby- step guide from a previous build: http://bit.ly/wNwJyQ.

Now, let’s turn your new box into a Linux gaming rig.

1 2 DOWNLOAD YOUR DISTRO

WE CHOSE the Ubuntu flavor of Linux for this project because it’s considered the easiest to use for beginners. To get started, we headed to the website (www.ubuntu.com) and downloaded our preferred flavor (image A). We chose version 12.04 LTS because it will be supported for five years rather than the latest 12.10 version, which will be only be supported for two years. After the download was complete, we prepared to burn the ISO image to a blank CD-R.

2 BURN THE ISO TO DISC

WE HAD TO find suitable software for burning the ISO to CD-R (at 695MB, the distro fits on one disc) since Windows 7 doesn’t natively allow burning ISO files like Windows 8 does. After searching, we settled on the free and easy-to-use Active@ ISO Burner. Go to www.ntfs.com/iso-burning.htm for the download, then run it. Browse to the ISO, select your optical drive, and hit the Burn button (image B). When it’s done, pop the disc into the optical drive of your new guinea rig, and prepare to install Linux.

3 INSTALL THE OS

THE BIGGEST DECISION you’ll have to make when installing Linux involves drive partitioning (a partition is a chunk of a storage device that appears to the OS as a separate volume). If you’re multibooting, install Linux to a separate partition, but if you’re like us and just want to run it off one storage device, you can ignore partition options (image C). After you’ve finished (or skipped) partitioning your hard drive, the OS will begin to install. It took about 30 minutes on our 7,200rpm drive, but it will take about 10-15 minutes on an SSD (we tested it just for fun).

4 UPDATE THE OS

JUST LIKE WITH Windows, the first thing you’ll want to do after you’ve installed Ubuntu is update the operating system. To do so, you will need to grab the latest updates from the Update Manager. Do this by clicking the power button in the right-hand corner of the screen and then clicking Update Manager to see a list of the latest updates; click Install Updates (image D). Unlike with Windows, which can take days to get up to date if you’re not using a Service Pack, the update process for Ubuntu took about 15 minutes. After that and a single reboot, we were up to date.

5 INSTALL VIDEO/SOUND DRIVESR

THE LAST THING you’ll need to do before installing Steam is to install the latest video drivers and other non-open-source or proprietary drivers, such as those for your motherboard. To install these drivers you’ll simply click the green video-card icon in the right-hand corner of the screen, which pops up a window that displays the proprietary drivers for your computer (image E). One of the cooler features of Ubuntu Linux is that it finds all the available drivers for your system, so you don’t have to visit the manufacturers’ website to download them. After you’ve finished downloading the drivers, you’ll need to restart your system, and then you’ll be completely set up and ready to tackle some games with Valve’s Steam client.

6 INSTALL STEAM

INSTALLING STEAM is fairly simple. Download the client from Valve’s website (www.valvesoftware.com) and then double-click it to run the installer, which takes you to Ubuntu’s Software Center. This Software Center shows you any newly installed software, and it’s where we’ll install Steam (image F). Once it’s installed, you can run the client. But first, you might want to check out other open-source games that are listed in the Software Center, which is a mini app store providing a few games and other small applications for Linux users.

7 SET UP STEAM

AFTER INSTALLING Steam, you will need to log into your account and authenticate your computer via email. You can start installing games on your Ubuntu 12.04 machine (image G) after your first log-in. As of this writing, there were 41 games available, and just like in Windows, each of them (aside from TF2, of course) costs money. You will also be able to download any of your previously purchased games that are Linux-compatible (Team Fortress 2, for example). Although 41 games isn’t very many, Valve has been adding new titles at a steady clip. The company added 15 of the 41 titles in its Linux library in just the first month of the new Steam client’s existence.

LIVING LA VIDA LINUX

OVERALL, WE WERE impressed with the experience we had using Linux for Internet browsing, word processing, and playing games. The OS ran surprisingly well on our modest rig. It booted quickly, shut down in a heartbeat, and handled multitasking without any problems. When it comes to gaming, our feeling is that it handles the games we play just fine, but the test bed of 41 offered by Steam at this time is too small a sample—we want more! We know Steam is not the only supplier of games, but we’re still talking about a relatively small gaming universe on Linux. As an example, Steam offers more than 6,000 titles on the Windows platform, so clearly no hardcore gamer can survive on Linux alone. Also, there are zero triple-A titles on Steam for Linux at this time—that right there is a deal-killer for us, at least in the long run. In testing, we sampled Team Fortress 2, Trine 2, and Waveform, and they all ran with ease at 1920x1200 on our budget box, with all settings maxed. We were greatly impressed by just how smoothly the games hummed along.

Just because we can’t survive on Linux alone doesn’t mean we didn’t like experimenting with it on the side, however. Building the Linux gaming box was a fun experience, and we’d recommend any enthusiast take it for a test drive. Besides, both Linux and Steam are free, so trying either one won’t cost you a dime.

WHERE ARE THE BENCHMARKS?

We know your eyes are scanning the pages looking for some hard numbers, but sadly, we don’t have any benchmarks this time around. We wish we did, but Linux isn’t very well supported by software developers who make benchmarking tools. We can tell you that to our eyes, all the games we tested played well on our GTX 650 at 1080p, running at least 30fps at all times. We were never lacking for GPU horsepower, in other words.

We wanted to try out the Phoronix Test Suite benchmarks, but Ubuntu warned us off installing it with a "bad quality" message. Another possible benchmark is x264, but it’s designed to test a machine’s CPU rather than its GPU, so it wouldn’t paint a complete picture of this system’s capabilities. Being a gaming machine, most people—ourselves included—are more interested in GPU performance and specific frame rates for games, but again, these numbers are hard to come by. None of the games on Steam have built-in benchmarks, and Fraps is Windows-only at this time, along with 3DMark, Catzilla, and all of the other games and programs we typically use. This situation might change now that Valve is pushing the gate open, but until it does, we’ll stick with an old favorite—EyeballMark.

read an article from Maximum PC | Mar-13 and would like to share it with you!

Saturday, February 9, 2013

Room service

Somewhere in Bellevue, Washington the Valve Corporation is working on a gaming PC that Gabe Newell describes as “living room-friendly.” So it’s safe to assume that, in addition to being compact, quiet, and easy to hook up to a TV, it’ll be based on standardized components inside a sealed case that does everything but detonate upon opening to prevent you from messing with the hardware.

I can’t say I’m not looking forward to one. I can easily imagine something that gives me easy access to my PC games in the living room vastly extending the amount of time I spend slumped on the couch. On the other hand, I know that the most effective and dependable way to make something easier to use and “living room-friendly” is to remove choices. I think of PC gamers as people who do things the way we feel like doing them. We’re people who like to mess with things: we customize, tweak, break, reconfigure, and perfect. It’s a platform for our imagination and expression as much as for our entertainment—even if we’re just expressing our choice of videocard.

All in all, I can live with the standardized hardware, but not without mods and my choice of controllers. The more flexibility and choice the mysterious “Steam Box” can offer me, the more likely I’ll cotton to it.

What about you? What would convince you to pony up for a living room rig from Valve? Let me know at logan@pcgamer.com.

LOOKING DEEP WITHIN

OVER THE YEARS, there’s been talk on and off about a technology called Deep Packet Inspection, but apart from sounding like the title of sysadmin-themed porn, why should you care?

Technically, DPI is what happens when an ISP looks past the headers, or metadata, of the packets that carry information all around the Internet and into the content. On its own, looking doesn’t hamper the Internet, but only that packet header is required by the machines that need to pump the cats through the series of tubes.

Like all technologies, DPI isn’t inherently good or bad, but potentially either. Good uses include cleaning up spam and viruses, and useful traffic shaping. Bad uses include dystopian control of digital expression and perfect totalitarian surveillance.

But let’s break that down a bit. Because DPI looks into each packet, it can be used, as in the case of the NSA warrantless wiretaps, to copy every packet. In the case of Comcast, it was used to identify Bit-Torrent traffic and disrupt it. In America, it’s been used to very specifically target advertising. In other countries known to use DPI, like China and Bahrain, it could be (and likely is) used for specifically targeting political activists.

DPI is the technology that allows violation of net neutrality, lets ISPs throttle competing services, and rights-holders to comb the net looking for content. But despite the dark side, given how easy and useful for companies it is, it’s inevitable. Without rigorous legal protection, you’ll never know if it’s used on you.

The only thing that slows down DPI at all is encryption, coded messages ISPs can look at but never make sense of. Fortunately, encryption tools are becoming available to everyone. DPI is the future of the net—and so is you encrypting your way back to free speech and privacy.

Quinn Norton writes about copyright for Wired News and other publications.

read an article from Maximum PC | Feb-13 and would like to share it with you!

Located near the peak of Mt. Fuji, the famed Iron Skillet Academy has existed for centuries, working to mold the best chefs of the age. Combining the unique ninja style of combat with the culinary skills of past masters, the academy is incredibly exclusive some years having not a single graduate!

This year is different however, not one but two ninja chefs have graduated! Kureijita, aka The Fat Ninja, and his sidekick Kaminoha! They have left the Iron Skillet and have now endeavored to open their own famed noodle shop. But in order to be the very best, they will have to find legendary ingredients that other chefs across the land use. In order to do this, they will travel to the homeland of each of these famed chefs and defeat them and their servants, all while serving up the highest quality noodles to the locals!

Mozilla is excited to announce that we’ve achieved a major milestone in WebRTC development: WebRTC RTCPeerConnection interoperability between Firefox and Chrome. This effort was made possible because of the close collaboration between the open Web community and engineers from both Mozilla and Google.

To help celebrate this momentous milestone, we thought it would be fun to call up our friends at Google to discuss it with them. Check out this Firefox-Chrome demonstration call between Mozilla’s Chief Innovation Officer, Todd Simpson, and Google’s Director of Product Management, Hugh Finnan,

Dear Twitter User:As a precautionary security measure, we have reset your Twitter account password. Check your inbox for a separate email from Twitter with instructions on how to reset your password. If you don't see an email, you can go to this page in our Help Center to request a password reset. More information is below.We recently detected an attack on our systems in which the attackers may have had access to limited user information - specifically, your username, email address and an encrypted/salted version of your password (not the actual letters and numbers in your password). Further information about the attack can be found in this blog post.Since your password has been reset, your old password will not work when you try to log into Twitter. We strongly encourage you to take this opportunity to select a strong password - at least 10 (but more is better) characters and a mixture of upper and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols - that you are not using for any other accounts or sites. Using the same password for multiple online accounts significantly increases your odds of being compromised.For more information about making your Twitter and other Internet accounts more secure, read our Help Center documentation or the FTC's guide on passwords.This attack was not the work of amateurs, and we do not believe it was an isolated incident. The attackers were extremely sophisticated, and we believe other companies and organizations have also been recently similarly attacked. For that reason we felt that it was important to reset your password and publicize this attack while we still gather information. We are also helping government and federal law enforcement in their effort to find and prosecute these attackers to make the Internet safer for all users.Twitter